Re: Open problems
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> This is certainly of no help at present but I feel that many
> conffiles can be shipped as normal files because they can be,
> if necessary, customized only by putting modified versions under
> /usr/local/share/texmf generally by sysadmin.
> IMHO only files which essentially need to be modified with other
> packages are conffiles.
In the past, I (and I'm sure Norbert too) also were inclined to handle
it like this. But discussions with other people, e.g. Manoj Srivastava
who's the main editor of Debian Policy, forced us to think it over. And
indeed, if we want to comply with Debian policy, any file which can
reasonably be changed to change the behavior of the system must be a
configuration file.
I think the compromise we've written into the TeX Policy is reasonable:
,----
| Files that are used to modify the behavior of executables must be
| treated as any other configuration file in a Debian package. However,
| files that are used to control the typeset output - the appearance of
| documents - need not be treated as configuration files. It is up to
| the maintainer of the package to decide which files make sense to be
| used for site-wide (as opposed to per-project or per-document)
| customization.
|
| A typical case for a site-wide configuration file is a file that must
| be changed if a style file should use additional modules (installed,
| for example, into TEXMFLOCAL). Options that only control document
| output are rather used for a particular document or documentation
| project and should usually not be installed as a configuration file.
`----
> For example /usr/share/doc/texlive-xetex/xetex/XeTeX-reference.ltx.gz
> Further it is not clear to me what fonts we should use under
> Debian/Linux. Does anyone has any idea with this issue?
I have not had the time to look into xetex at all. If you've found
problems, please report them to the BTS, so that we can keep track of
them. I suspect that they will turn out to be upstream bugs, since even
our dependencies are taken from upstream.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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